You’ve heard it before: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
We're taught so from an early age. But history has shown: you
often can get
something for basically nothing. In this episode, Quincy discusses
how we can all enjoy the abundance economy and - for all intents
and purposes - get a free lunch.

Dr. Salk spent 7 years assembling a team of researchers and
working to develop a Polio vaccine.

He conducted the most extensive field test ever, involving what
historian Bill O’Neal says were “20,000 physicians and public
health officers, 64,000 school personnel, and 220,000
volunteers.”

The vaccine was a success. So Dr. Salk set to work immunizing
everyone on Earth. He pushed the marginal costs of the Polio
vaccine as low as possible — to just the raw materials
necessary — by forgoing any financial benefits his intellectual
property would have brought him.

When asked about his patent, he said, “There is no patent. Could
you patent the sun?”

Dr. Salk stared down a massive problem and threw himself into it
with everything he could, without any aspiration for personal gain.
And in the process, he and his colleagues basically wiped out one
of the worst diseases ever.

Today, everyone’s life is better off as a direct result of this
one massive free lunch.

“The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.”
—Dr. Jonas Salk

Free lunches are important

Before I run through some modern-day examples of free lunches,
let me give you some background on myself, and why the notion of a
free lunch is so important to me.

I run a nonprofit, open source community where you can learn to
code, practice by building software for nonprofits, then get a job
as a developer. Thousands of people have gotten developer jobs so
far. And it’s free.

I was so committed to the idea of it being free that I put the
word “free” in the name.

Free can mean both libre — free as in free speech, and
gratis — free as in free beer. Just like the “free” in “Free Open
Source Software” (FOSS), the “free” in “freeCodeCamp” means both of
these.

But still, every day I encounter people who are skeptical. They
tell me they don’t use freeCodeCamp because “it sounds too good to
be true.”

“There’s no way all this can be free,” they say. “I’ll sign up
and give you my email address, and only then will I find out that I
need to pay $20 a month, right?” Or: “You’re free for now, but soon
you’ll throw up ads and paywalls, like everybody else does.”

Well, I’ve said this publicly a hundred times, and I’ll say it
publicly again: freeCodeCamp will always be free.

We operate on the fringe of capitalism. The frontier where
marginal costs asymptotically approach zero, and the very laws of
classical economics begin to unravel. A place called the abundance
economy.

And we’re not alone.

Low overhead engineering with lichess.org

Meet Thibault Duplessis, the founder of lichess.org — the second
most popular chess website on the planet.

As of a year ago, lichess had 78,000 unique daily visitors, who
play a total of 260,000 games of chess each day.

Thibault has no employees. He doesn’t even work on lichess
full-time. He still has a job at a development consultancy.

Lichess’s main competitor, Chess.com, is a privately-held
behemoth that makes millions of dollars each year off of banner ads
and premium membership up-sells, then spends that money acquiring
their competition.

Contrast this with Thibault, who has open-sourced lichess’s
server code. He has promised that lichess will be free forever, and
that it will never show ads.

But wait — how can he do this?

Because of the nature of modern web applications, and the
economics of their near-zero marginal costs.

Despite lichess’s complexity — and the scale at which it
operates — Thibault’s server costs are a mere $416 a month.

This cost is covered by merchandise and donations from his
grateful users, who increasingly include some of the best chess
players in the world.

How Craigslist covers costs by charging only 0.1% of its
users

Remember classifieds?

People used to pay a dollar per word for tiny ads that appeared
in the backs of newspapers, sandwiched between other ads.

It was searchable. You could use as many words as you wanted,
and include pictures. You could repost your ads as many times as
you wanted, in as many nearby cities as you wanted.

But if placing ads on Craigslist was free, how did Craigslist
make money?

Well, if you asked a random Craigslist user, they probably
wouldn’t be able to tell you. Most people just assume that
Craigslist is a nonprofit, supported by donations or something.

But Craigslist made $400 million last year.

They did it by charging to post in a few key categories within a
few key cities. If you want to list an apartment in New York City,
or a job in San Francisco, you have to pay Craigslist a small
fee.

This means that less than one in a thousand people who use
Craigslist actually pay any money to do so. Those real estate
agents in New York City and those recruiters in San Francisco are
paying for everyone else’s free lunch.

Craigslist doesn’t have investors. It keeps things simple. It
has a small team of about 40 people.

Craig still works at Craigslist. He handed over the role of CEO
to his long-time friend so he could focus on doing what he loves:
providing support for Craigslist users around the world.

Like the other people mentioned in this article, he doesn’t seem
to care about money. From what I can tell, he donates most of his
money through his charity CraigConnects. And he spends his downtime
advocating for causes he cares about, like supporting veterans and
helping more women start their careers in tech.

Crowd-sourcing contributions with Wikipedia

Before Wikipedia, the most popular encyclopedia was written by
paid experts, and printed in massive books. The Encyclopaedia
Britannica was so expensive that they wouldn’t even tell you its
price in their TV spots. (It cost $1,400.)

Jimmy Wales — Wikipedia’s visionary leader — had a better idea.
He leveraged the power of the internet and the wisdom of volunteer
contributors. And he made it free.

The number of volunteer-contributed articles on Wikipedia
exploded. It quickly surpassed traditional encyclopedias in the
scope of its content.

Instead of waiting for a new physical edition to hit the press,
Wikipedia editors could instantly publish updates to articles.
Wikipedia was so up-to-date that many people started using it for
news on current events.

Traditional encyclopedias were quickly backed into a corner.
They were paying expert writers and editors to create their
content. Surely this resulted in more accurate information than
Wikipedia’s volunteer-driven free-for-all.

But in 2005, a major academic journal published an analysis
comparing the factual accuracy of Wikipedia versus the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. It found:

“Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of
the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation
finds.” — The abstract from Nature’s analysis

In a last-ditch effort, The Encyclopaedia Britannica pushed
back, but Nature upheld its finding.

This was the final blow to the encyclopedia industry, which had
flourished for decades by selling stacks of books door-to-door to
guilty parents.

A decade later, Wikipedia is now the 6th most visited website on
the planet. And covers its operating costs through more than $70
million in donations each year from grateful patrons.

But despite all of Jimmy’s accomplishments, people seem to be
much more preoccupied with his money. Or rather, his
lack-there-of.

Here’s what you get when you type “Jimmy Wales net worth” into
Google:

Below this result, Google shows you pictures of people who
started other large websites. Each of them has a net worth that’s
five orders of magnitude larger than Jimmy’s paltry $1 million.

People have a hard time accepting that someone would set out to
build something as important as Wikipedia without bothering to make
money out of it.

One person went so far as to ask straight up on Quora: “Is Jimmy
Wales rich?”

Jimmy responded:

“By any sane standard of measurement, yes, of course I’m rich.
Nearly half of the people on earth live on less than $2 a day. I
spend more than that on my cellphone bill.”

There’s so much more to life than money.

Why are people so preoccupied by money, and the net worth of
famous people? Because they’re operating in a scarcity mindset.

They are so preoccupied by the risk of not having enough that
they can’t see the real risk: missing out on the potential for so
much more.